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2023

Sunsetting Gitter: Towards Efficient Community Engagement

As we're starting to build a team around Material for MkDocs, we've decided to sunset and archive our Gitter channel on October 13, 2023 in favor of GitHub Discussions.

As part of our efforts to improve the processes for maintaining Material for MkDocs and for supporting the community, we have reviewed the use of different communication channels. At the moment, both Gitter and GitHub Discussions allow to ask the community for support and to discuss ideas and issues. In the past weeks, we have begun to question whether this duplication is in the best interest of our project. This post explains the rationale behind our decision.

Using git sparse-checkout for faster documentation builds

Leveraging git sparse-checkout in GitHub Actions enabled us to speed up documentation builds in our repository, cutting checkout times from 20 to 30 seconds to just 2 seconds.

Developing an efficient approach to build documentation in CI workflows is essential, especially when working in large repositories with thousands of commits, like ours. Of course, we want to build documentation quickly and efficiently, ensuring fast and productive workflows. When using both the wonderful git-committers and git-revision-date-localized plugins to display document contributors and dates at the bottom of each page, we are required to set fetch-depth: 0, which resulted in checkout times of 20 to 30 seconds on our repository. By leveraging git sparse-checkout within GitHub Actions, check out time was brought down to 2 seconds.